JPMorgan Chase wants employees to improve their work-life balance

Young bankers were previously allowed one work-free weekend a month, but with the ‘Pencils Down’ initiative, the bank will now allow every weekend off

‘If you have 80 hours of work to do in a week, you’re going to have 80 hours of work to do in a week, regardless of whether you’re working Saturdays or not,’ a junior banker says.
Photograph: Bebeto Matthews/AP

Workaholics of Wall Street, Jamie Dimon has some news for you. It’s time to kick off those wingtips, slip out of that suit and chillax.

The JPMorgan Chase boss has become the latest financier to worry that his bankers are working too hard for their bonuses. On Thursday the bank announced an initiative called “Pencils Down”, aimed at helping its employees improve their work-life balance.

Previously, young bankers were allowed one work-free weekend a month. Now the bank wants them to take every weekend off unless they are working on a “live” deal. Work-free weekends are “realistic to what this generation wants”, Carlos Hernandez, JPMorgan’s head of global banking, told the Wall Street Journal.

Wall Street’s banks first began to review their weekend policies in 2013 after the death of a 21-year-old Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern, Moritz Erhardt. Erhardt was found dead after having an epileptic seizure in a shower after working a 72-hour shift.

“One of the triggers for epilepsy is exhaustion and it may be that because Moritz had been working so hard his fatigue was a trigger for the seizure that killed him. But that’s only a possibility,” coroner Mary Hassell said at the time.

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Despite the fact that his death could not be definitely linked to work-related exhaustion, it left a lasting effect on the banking industry. James Gorman, chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, said that Erhardt’s death “has caused everyone to step back and say, ‘Hey, have we got this right?’”

Goldman Sachs began to require that all analysts and associates be out of office and not work between 9pm on Friday and 9am on Sunday. JPMorgan implemented a policy of giving young bankers one work-free weekend a month, also known as “protected weekend”.

Other banks like Bank of America, Citigroup, Barclays and Deutsche Bank implemented similar policies to help their young staff maintain some semblance of a work-life balance. Yet the real culprit behind work-life imbalance at banks is the actual workload, say some bankers.

“If you have 80 hours of work to do in a week, you’re going to have 80 hours of work to do in a week, regardless of whether you’re working Saturdays or not. That work is going to be pushed to Sundays or Friday nights,” one junior banker at Deutsche Bank told the New York Times, when policies limiting weekend work first came about.

While in Davos in 2014, Gorman said that he wasn’t sure if limiting weekend work was “the right answer”. Morgan Stanley did not introduce an official rule about work on weekends.

“I’m not sure how you stop work if there’s a deal on,” he said at the time. “It’s more common sense, it’s more upward feedback and evaluation. If we have individuals who are not managing the young folks properly, we need to deal with that.”